Time to prepare for Christmas temporary staff

Employment agencies need to plan early to ensure they are ready to cope with the influx of Christmas temporary staff.

Christmas represents the busiest recruitment drive of the year as companies.Industries such as manufacturing, hospitality, retail and logistics, look to increase their workforce to deal with seasonal variations.

Retailer John Lewis is already advertising for 3,500 temporary staff in the run-up to Christmas. Last year parcel courier Yodel increased its workforce by 70 per cent, hiring an extra 7000 temporary drivers to fulfil Christmas delivery slots.

The admin impact of Christmas temporary staff

A spike in demand for Christmas temporary staff is good business for recruitment agencies. However, scaling up the workforce for a short intense period places extra workloads on the desks of HR and payroll teams.

“With employees on multiple shift patterns, contracts and pay rates across their client base, it is imperative for agencies to track employee working time. Doing so helps agencies to monitor absences, maintain accurate payroll and invoice calculations and enforce compliance with the Working Time Directive.

“Relying on manual timesheets and spreadsheets leaves agencies at risk of breaching the law and open to time fraud and errors caused by data duplications, resulting in overpayments.”

The fact that most systems, like Vanquish, are cloud-based means they can be rolled out quickly. Its scalability means it can easily accommodate seasonal recruitment drives.

The use of biometric terminals to verify staff attendance helps to prevent fraudulent clocking practices, such as buddy punching, and ensures the data collated is reliable and accurate for payroll and invoice purposes.

Vanquish seamlessly integrates with third party payroll and recruitment software streamlines the process further. This reduces the time spent reconciling manual timesheets and eliminating errors caused by data duplication.

“Total visibility of the workforce assists agencies to reduce attrition, enhance productivity and deliver total transparency to clients that are receiving the hours they are paying for, all of which will improve client satisfaction.”